banma baa:darharuko dherai bhandaharu bhandaa bandaaharu chha, or, a brief(?) and incomplete(!) introduction to nepali language.

ahhh yes. the best summary of my language skills so far is this: despite at least 25 hours of intensive one-on-one lessons and at least as much time studying over the past three weeks, i am suddenly much more like a stroke victim with a severe aphasia than i ever wanted to be.

when i speak nepali*, i know what i want to be saying. i don’t expect to have great grammer, but, hey, i’ve got, like, nouns and pronouns and verbs, and i’m stringin’ ‘em together…that’s BASICALLY understandable…basically… right? and yet, inevitably, whether i’m speaking to a coworker who’s gamely letting me practice or asking directions of a shopkeeper (or, really, addressing anyone except my nepali teacher with anything but the most basic pleasantries), the responses are almost always a bewildered but encouraging smile, and a sort of desperate glance at someone nearby to see if they had, possibly, deciphered my garbled grammar, heinous mispronunciation, and/or apparent non-sequitor. (eg the time i cheerfully responded to my officemate in nepali that yes! i have many pens! so glad was i to be able to extend a helping hand, office-supply-sharing our way over the language barrier. in fact, he had asked me if i wanted the fan on…in english. as he said later, “we have communication problems.”)

caveat: i wrote this first bit above about a week ago. since then, i think i’ve gotten over some sort of hump, whether it’s just a matter of relinquishing my last bits of self-consciousness or it’s actually a skill-based breakthrough. in any case, when i first meet nepalis now, they are generally impressed by how much i speak after a month here (“hajur? ek mainaa matraai?”). this could very well be because relatively few foreigners learn more nepali than absolutely necessary, particularly with the ferocity that i’m attacking the task (given that my work is paying for me lessons, i feel obligated to give them a return on this significant investment); or because they’re just being nice, which would be typical. now my problem is more commonly being credited with too MUCH language skill…i get a coherent sentence out, and people graciously and mistakenly assume that i’ll understand rapid fire nepali. what i’m trying to say is that this place in the anti-france.

whatever. my mom says i’m good at languages. or maybe more to the point, i shouldn’t expect to be fluent after three weeks of studying a language that is wildly, WILDLY different than any of the other five languages i have forgotten…er, learned, at some point in my life.

~nerd alert~
many normal humans might find the next couple of paragraphs of linguistic detail less than thrilling. short version: nepali is kinda hard to pick up. (however, if you stick with me, i’ll tell you what the post title means).

ANYWAY. the vagaries of learning nepali: on the one hand, nepali is an indo-aryan language closely related to sanskrit…which means complex. for instance, you get things like FIFTEEN 3rd person subject pronouns, based on number, physical proximity to the speaker, and level of formality [there are three levels for 2nd and 3rd person pronouns, as opposed to the two levels in the 2nd person address you find in french (tu and vous), for instance…more on the implications of this, another time.]

for a native english (or french or spanish) speaker, word order is pretty counterintuitive as a result of postpositions and verbs. postpositions are prepositions, just more, er, after the fact. verbs go at the end of the sentence, often after convoluted appositives (i’m sure there are ways to avoid this that i just haven’t learned yet), and conjugations have both a postive and negative conjugation, rather than the appendage of “not”, “ne…pas”, or “no”, as in english, french, or spanish.

eg the sentence “today after work i am not going home. i am going from the office to her house” is “ajaa, kaam-garepacchi mero gharma jaadina. officebata wahaa:ko gharma jaanchhu:”…
- TO someone’s house is ghar(house)+ma(to, in, at)
- one kind of possessive is formed by attaching KO to the end of a pronouns, as in wahaa(he/she)+KO. mero (my) is irregular.
- AFTER work is kaam-garnu(to work) + epachhi (AFTER), dropping the –nu infinitive ending
- the two endings of jaanu (to go), above, indicate both subject (i) and positive or negative action (i do or do not go).
on the bright side, almost all plurals are formed by the addition of –haru to the noun, and verbs are pretty regular, only getting tricky when it comes to appending certain non-postposition structures.

then there’s the pronunciation. while not tonal, like chinese, there are lots of distinctions in sounds that we just don’t recognize in english. for instance, there are four ways one would pronounce the each of the english letters “d” and “t”, best envisioned on a two-by-two grid. on one axis you have aspirated (with a strong release of breath) and non-aspirated (without breath); on the other is “dental” (pronounced with tongue against upper teeth) and “retroflex” (pronounced with tongue against the hard palate). there are also aspirated/non-aspirated versions of “b”, “p”, “k”, “c”, “j” and “g”; and a few kinds of “s” and “n” that i’ve got even less of a grip on. for me, though, the REAL kicker were the “a”s. one a, written आ in long form, is transliterated as “aa” and pronounced “ah”. the other, written अ in long form, is transliterated “a” and pronounced as “uh”. ON TOP of that, vowels are often “nasalized”, meaning you kinda close down or add a light “ng” to the vowel. this changes how they are written in any number of ways, and is transliterated with : or ~.

on the bright side (?), there are different written characters for each of these distinctions. in that way, it’s more directly phonetic than english. it makes total sense…if, y’know, you’re a native speaker…otherwise, still a total bitch to get the hang of.

just to give you a sense of what a huge difference this makes when you’re speaking: the root of pretty much every word in the title of this post, until about a week ago, sounded roughly like “banda” to me. however, pronounced properly, it reads (i think?) “in the forest, monkeys have more cabbages than political demonstrations/strikes.”

hey, the more you know, right?

~mild nerd alert~
well I think the next couple of paragraphs are interesting, but if you’re feelin’ all incurious and shit…short version: nepali is kinda hard to pick up, but not as bad as the stuff written above would indicate. molly clearly loves to complain.

…on the other hand, the ethnolinguistic composition of the nepal (92 languages were officially recognized in the 2001 census) means several things…

1) there are fascinating issues of language and identity going on

2) many nepalis i’ve met speak anywhere from 2-6 languages. they are like the dutch of south asia. a common repetoire might include: at least a little english (if they’re talking to me), nepali (the lingua franca of the country), hindi (often at least understood, picked up from bollywood movies or other media), their “mother-tongue”, and maybe another non-nepali lanaguage, just for kicks. certainly makes all the english-nativist rhetoric floated around in the US look absurd.

2.5) although demographics are shifting these days towards more primary nepali acquisition, for about 50% of nepalis, nepali is their second, or even third language. the “mother-tongue” is the language spoken at home and in a family’s village or region of origin. many are in the tibeto-burman language family, there are other indo-aryan languages, and there are even some apparent isolates, for good measure**.

3) as a result of 1-2.5, commonly spoken nepali is way more simplified than literary nepali. for instance, i get away with learning only about half of the 3rd person pronouns, and their accompanying conjugations.


this post turned out to be quite a bit longer than i had imagined, so sorry about that…long story belatedly short: it’s a huge relief to be making progress. the professional necessity of my learning nepali aside, i find myself really discomfited by being unable to speak the language of the place i’m visiting/living, on several levels. it strikes me as vaguely disrespectful, for sure, but i also find it profoundly alienating. i don’t feel like i can possibly connect with the people around me, if i can’t understand how they speak…and by extension, think and exist. anyway, looking forward to learning more about nepali and nepalis as my time continues.

* there are some significant language politics issues in nepal. my use of “nepali” to describe the lingua-franca of the political entity of nepal is not meant to be normative. nepali is most commonly used to describe the language that I’m stumbling my way through. however, among newars, for example, the newari language is often referred to as “nepal bhasa” (“language of nepal”). maybe more on language politics and language and the state in another post.

** so for some probably mildly to moderately inaccurate context gleaned from nowhere more reliable than wikipedia, idle conversation, and other dubious sources: indo-aryan is sort of a spectrum of languages in south asia that grew out of sanskrit (having varying degrees of persian/arabic influence thanks to the mughals), similar to the way romance languages all developed from latin. urdu/hindi/nepali are as mutually intelligible as spanish/italian/french are. tibeto-burman is nowhere as coherent as a grouping, and these are more likely to be mutually unintelligible from each other than indo-aryan languages. the t-b languages in nepal are of the “himalayish” subfamily.

if you want a non-dubious source: i’ve been working my way through John Whelpton’s “A History of Nepal” (2005, Cambridge U Press), which is pretty much the only up-to-date, single volume, historical survey i’ve managed to find. although it focuses on political history since 1950, the first few chapters are a dense, but well-written and comprehensive review of the history of the area to that point, including some notes on linguistic history. and if you're ever looking for MAD political intrigue, you can not do better than 17th-early 20th century nepal.